


Head Over Heels

by Glinda



Category: Doctor Who, Sarah Jane Adventures
Genre: F/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-03
Updated: 2008-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-07 05:32:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holding hands, skipping stones and fighting aliens, who says romance is dead?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Head Over Heels

He blamed Sarah Jane. Over the last couple of years he'd blamed Sarah Jane for a fair few things, cursed her for even more. If it hadn't been for her he wouldn't even be here. It was that or admit that without all the things he'd seen and done through knowing her, he'd have died several times in that time. Not to mention another few times in the last six months, because here was a heck of a long way from home.

Clyde Langer, time traveller extraordinaire had a nice ring to it. Shame his little jaunt back to 1973 had been entirely accidental and, from the look of things, entirely permanent. Being fifteen and almost forty years in your own past wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. London in the seventies wasn't anywhere near as glamorous as it looked on the tele but it was every bit as seedy and dangerous as he'd always been careful to prevent Luke from finding out in his own time. He gave some thought to letting his hair grow, but after a few weeks remembered exactly why he'd always kept his hair short back home. Besides, he reasoned, he had enough problems these days without turning into a walking cliché.

He was entirely honest about his origins on all of three occasions, and the first twice the other person already knew the basics.

Instinct and Sarah Jane's lectures kept him away from big historical events and officialdom. Alien invasions however were another matter altogether. Stopping those couldn't hurt, he decided, after all he knew they hadn't succeeded, no harm in helping history along. He kept out of UNIT's way until Sarah Jane had done her disappearing act, easier than he expected, she'd been right about them being a bit more homespun in those days. Torchwood on the other hand were still honing their trademark mix of glamour, technology and dubious morals, so he ended up he ended up first in a shiny cell in an equally shiny building in London, being interrogated by a couple of hardnosed but easily baffled agents, and later in a dank badly lit and alien infested dungeon trading reminisces about the twenty first century with an immortal American. Thankfully the immortal American had a fondness for people lost in time, and even more for friends of people who'd travelled in mysterious blue boxes and promised to pass a message onto Sarah Jane in case the only way home turned out to be what the other fellow referred to as 'the slow path'.

He wasn't entirely surprised when a few weeks later a young man in uniform, a beret and a knowing smirk turned up on his doorstep. Apparently talking your way out of Torchwood's tender mercies made you eminently employable by UNIT.

The third time had the virtue of being entirely voluntary.

When he first met her, he wasn't expecting to tell her anything other than that the road was closed. She was gorgeous in a subtle elfin fashion, a decade his senior and he'd been thoroughly warned about not getting involved with people in the past, so he refused to even think about that mischievous smile of hers. An unexpected outbreak of Silurians later, they'd saved each other's lives at least twice and he was ready to break his promise to himself and ask her out. Her mother named her Dorothea but everyone else called her Dodo, and she shone like a small sun, plucky, bouncy, and always the height of fashion. Spinning, always moving, her laughter tinged with a manic sort of desperation that only faded when their dates were interrupted by his work following him home. Eternally fascinated by his work but that fascination always tainted by that deep-rooted fear that followed her like a second shadow.

It became an obsession, figuring out what had happened to her when she was barely older than her was now. It was late 1975 and they'd been together for exactly a year before he got anywhere major with his quest. For all her fascination with the odd and the alien she clung to normality like a security blanket, odd he thought given how unbridled her joy whenever they'd just escaped danger or capture by the skin of their teeth. He'd been working on it for months, gently, always backing off whenever he hit a nerve, desperately needing to avoid sending her into flight. He'd told her his own secret barely a fortnight before, the night of his eighteenth birthday, tongue loosened by his first few legal beers, told her about his old life, his mum, saving the world after school with Luke, Maria and Sarah Jane, about all the people he wasn't spending his eighteenth birthday with. She'd just held his hand and whispered that there was always twenty-one, and he'd clung to her and that hope like a lamp in the dark. This time it seemed it was his turn to light a lamp.

It wasn't the way he'd expected her to open up, but he supposed it was fitting. Lying on a blanket in the park, surrounded by the detritus of their anniversary picnic (he could be smooth, no matter what Maria thought) watching the sun set and the stars come out. It had been a casual comment on her distracted state, but once she started she couldn't seem to stop. All that joy, adventure and fear that had been her life in the TARDIS for a few short months, before the horror, and underneath it the regret that tinged her voice but remained unspoken. Her voice was brittle when she finished, commenting that she always wondered why he hadn't just looked it up, he doubtless had the resources and contacts to get the facts. He hadn't though, because it wasn't the facts that was important. The telling was what mattered, not the knowing. She'd laughed at his honesty, the laughter all broken and strained like she was coughing up sobs that turned into broken glass in her mouth. She seemed to cry forever, quietly but steadily as if they'd been behind her eyes for ten years, just waiting. The horror of having someone poke around inside her head, against her will, finally being spoken aloud. They stayed there all night, him whispering promises and reassurances into her hair long after she'd gone to sleep.

It niggled at him, the longer he spent in the seventies, the more he missed home, the more he realised how difficult going home would be. Dodo teased him regularly about how ridiculous he would look trying to pass for fifteen if he suddenly got zapped back to early 2010, even if she couldn't entirely hide her disappointment at how un-futuristic his time really was. Three years felt like a lifetime, but she was a walking example of how much a couple of months of time travel could change someone. Of how impossible it was to explain the reality of it to anyone who didn't already understand.

She'd insisted he take the day off work and given him plenty of warning to make sure too. A trip to the country she'd said, just the thing he needed after an unexpected dip in a loch while trying to fight off some Zygons while simultaneously trying to avoid a young Sarah Jane. He'd half heartedly argued that he'd seen enough of the countryside lately to last him a lifetime, but between her resolution and the weight of a certain phone call from Cardiff, he capitulated with good grace. Sunshine, wide-open roads and watching his beautiful girlfriend drive her equally beautiful little car, life didn't get much better so he followed her lead and refused point blank to think about the future.

They parked on a quiet back road and picnic in the only field they can find that is free of cows. She seemed far away today, but that's alright because he is too. A right pair they make, he mused, her stuck a decade in the past, him stuck several more in the future. Afterwards they go for a walk and he doesn't mention that they're walking in circles. Mainly because she gets increasingly agitated as the circles she leads them in get smaller. So instead he held her hand and made up stories about the secret lives of the cows that occasionally menace them. They come back to the road barely 500 yards up from where they parked, and she stands stock still in the middle of the road and stared silently at the corner. He knows without asking that this is as close as she's ever got to where she was supposed to meet the man whose reputation seems to hang like a shadow over nearly everyone he knows. He wonders if the man in the blue box ever made it back here, how long he waited for the girl standing by his side. Eventually she let go of his hand and walked to where she could see round the corner, to where a blue box was no longer waiting. She looked younger than him standing on her own in the middle of the empty country lane. Carefully he walked over to join her, sliding his hand back into hers. It had taken her ten years to get this far, he doubted that she was ready for what else he wanted to ask her.

"You've found a way home, haven't you?" She wasn't looking at him, so staring moodily at the horizon over her head was probably a wasted effort. He stared anyway.

"Yeah, might be my only chance, I don't…I can't…I…"

She interrupted him before he could get his words anymore tangled up.

"You don't belong here." She was quiet for a long time, he couldn't think of anything else to say, unable to deny her statement. "I know that feeling."

The shadows lengthened across the lane as they stood in silence. She always seemed as out of place here as he felt, so why was it that she the only thing that always felt right here? Maybe he already had his answer.

"You could come with me?"

His attempts at nonchalance evaporated as her face lit up with a glee that was infectious.

"I thought you'd never ask."


End file.
